Seven Lions

Available here.

tl;dr The university needs Wikipedia more than Wikipedia needs the university.

Thanks to Wikipedia’s tech-blog we can see how Michael Jackson’s death looks from the perspective of server load and traffic:

Wikipedia Load Spike - MJ RIP

Traffic Spike

This kind of epiphenomenon is the bread-and-butter of research that tries to interpolate social causes from digital reverberations.  Not that any such research is going on, but once we’ve all grown sick of mining vulgar Latin textbooks for word preference, we’ll develop procedures to handle stuff like this.

Updated to note that the second-order epiphenomenon related to this is the crash of Wikipedia’s tech blog due, I assume, to the massive amount of traffic I’ve sent it.  In 30 years, I imagine some poor PhD student will be trying to track the traffic-related crash of tech blogs to the death of pop icons.

I recently received an email from my aunt, who works for the International Rescue Committee.  She’s in the Sudan, helping people as she’s done for years now.   Her work, and the work of people like her, who are willing to place themselves in harm’s way to educate and ameliorate, stands in stark contrast to the growing hacktivist movements.  While the attempt, for instance,  to ID Iranian paramilitary forces, may provide some support to protesters in Iran, I’m starting to wonder how much real change can be effected via purely digital means.  As a society, we’ve fetishized hackers, but when you examine the Iranian manifestations for Hackers Without Borders, it’s remarkably weak.  A group like HWB draws its name from MSF, or Doctors Without Borders, but suffers in comparison.  It’s time hacktivist action lives up to hacktivist rhetoric, or it’s time that we acknowledge that a socially aware hacker needs to turn off the computer and travel to sub-Saharan Africa if they really want credibility.

Google has released updated kmls with fresh satellite imagery of Tehran, though it’s from June  18th, so it can’t begin the real process of commons-based examination for clues as to what’s going on in Tehran.  According to their update, they’re trying to get higher resolution imagery which, assumably, would also be more recent, in which case we’ll see a flood of image analysis.  Unlike the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which used high technology to organize protests but was an internal Ukrainian affair that was only analyzed and watched by the world abroad, there seems to be a growing desire throughout the Internet to try to do something to facilitate the Iranian protests.  There’s only so much one can actually do with computer networks, but DDoS attacks, image analysis, spatial analysis, tips for dealing with tear gas or performing field first aid, even the ubiquitous “Switch your Twitter ID to Tehran”–all of these have been occurring and still people are struggling to do more than just watch.  I wonder if it’s because there’s a growing sense of activism or if it’s because this is all considered to be a big interactive game.  Or maybe those two aren’t as different as we may think.

Updated to add a link to a Slashdot report on the gaps in Iranian Internet censorship.  Interestingly, World of Warcraft and XBox Live network traffic aren’t being blocked, so you can play Halo and pass along critical revolutionary information at the same time…

Whyweprotest.net, the activist faction of Anonymous, the collective entity that exists as the sort of summa cum laude reductio absurdum of all that Web 1.0 was, is running a secure site for news and communication and distributed denial of service attacks in support of protesters in Iran.

I suppose this is what the world looks like when the hackers become more aware of systemic social issues.  If all the energy, technology and networks that have heretofore been directed at pranking corporations and distributing media of dubious aesthetic value were to be instead channeled toward social change…  I don’t even know what to call it, but it should be interesting.

Update:  You can Digg it here.

Just finished reading Immanuel Wallerstein’s article in the excellent Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change.  Wallerstein is the founder of World Systems Theory, which focuses on the processual links between societies as an explanation of historical events, though the theory has grown far beyond Wallerstein’s capitalism-oriented, modernity-constrained initial description.  Without getting too arcane, there’s a movement in the academy toward integrating environmental systems into the study of history, and to do so you need to systemitize history to make it feasible.  But Wallerstein’s essay–the final one in the book–doesn’t focus on understanding extractivist culture or divining proxies for deforestation, but rather on the collapse of the modern world.

Pretty heady stuff.  According to Wallerstein, the systemic failure of the current system is already a given, and it’s only a question of whether the enlightened aristocracy of Davos ends up controlling the next great system or the Wikipedia-like, distributed (and chaotic) peers typified by the World Social Forum.  For those of you, like me, who are unfamiliar with the WSF, their meetings sound like the equivalent of a real-world Wikipedia:

Other people that were not coming from Latin America were unconsciously excluded from the forum, as there were no interpreters at the forum at all, and it was very difficult for people who were coming from outside Latin America to follow speeches or activities that were taking place in the forum from day one of the forum. It was made clear that it was not the responsibility of the organizers to organize interpreters for people, it was people’s responsibility to organize their own interpreters and it was very difficult for us to get that as there was no prior arrangements made. This was a pity. In our struggles in South Africa we have many different languages but our movements always take responsibility for organizing translation – especially for visitors. Of course the NGOs in South Africa want to do everything in English but not the movements.

Of note is the growing importance of academics and Non-Governmental Organizations in the ranks of the WSF, which runs afoul of an anti-expert bias like that typically associated with Wikipedia (And philosophical Daoism, but that’s way off topic).  Contrast this with the expert-driven and much swankier World Economic Forum and you start to see an almost uncanny resemblance between the state of these two groups and the state of the university and the growing connected-world knowledge bases.  The World Economic Forum is about to be underway, and it’ll even include celebrity Twitter interviews as well as a host of externally accredited experts, thereby limiting the number of participants to a modest two and half thousand, versus the tens of thousands who show up for the WSF.

Wallerstein posits these two organizations as emblematic of the two paths toward the “Next System” (Some kind of post-capitalist/post-Marxist future means of economic organization) and wonders, as I did in my last post, how the current instability will play out.  It is interesting to note that there is some kind of dichotomous self-organization occuring across various realms, with a peer-collaboration expression on the one side (WSF is criticized, like Wikipedia, as being Communist at its core) and an expert-oriented version acting like a Zoroastrian neccessary-opposite.  Strangely enough, these various evil dopplegangers seem to be unaware of their placement within a putative Pantheon of Global Social Conflict:

Wikipedia, Open Source Software, World Social Forum

vs.

Academia, Proprietary Software, World Economic Forum

Since I can’t think of a simple dichotomous relationship to posit Local Community / Global Multinational without expanding on whether I’m talking about services, products or agriculture, I’ll leave it out.  I realize there’s no strict alignment between these forces, and that you have academics supporting Wikipedia and Apache being used by major corporations, but there’s already a growing sense that the local organic farmer (or bookshop owner) should be using Linux and supporting Wikipedia and taking part in the WSF.  Not sure how the social networking sites figure into this, they don’t seem to skew or splinter along ideological lines, but that could just be a sign of my own unfamiliarity (and extreme disdain) for them.  What’s extremely strange, at least to me, is that there is a definite dualistic nature to our modern world ideological system, and yet it seems that we’ve fractured into more ideological bantustans than ever before–due in part to the remarkable ability of the Web to break down communication and organization costs and therefore allow for Mao’s thousand-flower continuum.  The bantustans are natural conflict-absorbers, because they make disagreements, like modern art, seem so subjective.  To paraphrase a quote that may or may not have come from Kissinger, you can express vicious disagreement precisely because of the very low stakes.  But this masks a very real, distinct dichotomy of ideology that permeates global culture and which seems to be expressing itself in every new endeavor.

Another interesting point raised at Akahele (The cautious site with the beautiful name) highlights the problem of crowds: the concern for peer-produced data in an environment where some of those peers want to insert malicious, propagandistic or otherwise known-flawed results into a system.  But the problem isn’t limited to peer-produced knowledge, and it seems that El Sevier, the publisher everyone loves to hate, is just as happy to game the system in an entirely expert-driven manner.  The cynical part of me has always argued that the criticisms of Wikipedia result from a naive vision of knowledge production in traditional spheres, and this seems to back it up, but I think it’s more problematic than that.  We seem to be moving into a post-post-modern period where it’s not just the critics who think that meaning and truth are malleable but also the consumers and creators of knowledge.  It’s like 1984 but instead of just Big Brother manipulating the facts, imagine if Winston Smith was also manipulating the facts in his own personal life and on common peer resources.  The journal industry in academia has been oft-criticized as of late, concurrent with the criticism of academia itself, and I think if we’re not careful we’re going to see the El Seviers and Wikipedias of the world meet in the middle, where only the most mundane of facts are agreed upon and, like modern news agencies, anyone will be able to point to their favored experts (or non-expert encyclopedias) to support whatever malicious intention they have.  Doubly worrisome is the effect this must be having on the traditional citizen, who according to Enlightenment theory requires their proper understanding of the world (known as education) to make informed choices in directing the course of their political system.

Nowadays, with ready access to expert and non-expert knowledge that supports every side of every debate, we’re faced with an extremely public social surgery, and all indications are that amputation or leeching will come back in vogue.  Whatever your stance on creationism or globalization or climate change or Islam or Tibetan nationalism, you can now find experts, news outlets, journal articles, &c &c to support you.  This does not seem to be a sustainable system.  But what’s the solution?  Will the backlash be a clamoring for a restoration of aristocratic control or a pulsing anarchy of rival ideologies?  History tends to describe the latter as too unstable to last for long.  I don’t know.

Recon by fire

For those of you curious as to how the game is played, it was summed up like this:

ALL OF YOUR CHARACTERS WILL BE SLAUGHTERED LIKE CATTLE.  Don’t expect anyone you roll up in the first week to remain alive for more than twenty four hours.  Remember Wierzbowski in Aliens?  Of course you don’t.  You’re Wierzbowski.  Or that guy who takes off his helmet on Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan.  Expect to have the lifespan of an extra in a John Woo film.  Most likely within two seconds of your first contact, you’ll be reduced to bloody chunks.  Learn to love it.  Don’t get too attached – after all, you don’t have to write letters to their mothers/queen.  Learn the ropes, and someday you’ll be able to do the same to the next batch of lambs led to the slaughter.

For those of you trying to figure out the theme of this blog…  Well, I’ve got no answers.

As more and more amateurs continue to produce knowledge, software and books with little or no help from experts, I think it’s time to clear the mist a little and remember what the world was producing when only experts were in charge.  Too often critiques, like those of Andrew Keen, seem to imply that everything being produced by the infinite number of monkeys and their infinite copies of WordPress is far inferior to that of some mythical, Golden Age of Software, Books and All Products in General That Were Created by Experts.  It’s too easy to focus on software (Does anyone remember what you had to do to get Falcon 3.0 to run on your computer?), so let’s look at some more and less concrete examples.

It’s Pronounced Jag-You-Are

Series 2 FHC... {Wistful John Crichton Voice} I used to have one of those...

It’d be easy to point to the Ford Pinto–poor, derided, explosive thing–but I’d rather latch on to a vehicle more dear to my heart: the Jaguar E-Type.  The E-Type is lauded as a classic, and it is, and a beautiful car, which is also true, but anyone who’s owned one or had any experience with Lucas electrical systems or poorly fitting body work will know that, despite its being the product of an amazing designer and some well-paid professionals, the car had bugs.  Every iteration had bugs, and nobody who bought one (Either at the time they were being produced or later as a classic car) thought otherwise–okay, lots of people thought otherwise, but right-thinking people ignore them.  We used to be more accepting of bugs, and no one ever thought that the crumby cooling system on an old Jag somehow subverted its beautiful lines or its amazing performance.

The Entire World, in One Book?

You know what they say about a World Book encyclopedia, it's too small to get smart in, but you get smart as soon as you get out...

Now, maybe you’ll say a motor vehicle made in the 60s isn’t equivalent to modern peer-produced knowledge banks like Wikipedia, so let’s look at something a little more modern and encyclopedic.  The World Book Encyclopedia includes, along with too-short clips of Verde, an article on the history of India which barely touches on the Muslim role in the independence movement.  I’m an environmental historian who focuses on China, so what do I know, but my wife is an expert on South Asia, and has a graduate degree from one of the top institutions in the world, and she pointed out to me that the neglect on the part of World Book to include the role of the Muslim League or Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was a travesty.  Built by experts, and buggy, the World Book Encyclopedia isn’t a failure any more than an overheating Jaguar.

Bugs scale with a product.  And if some of that product is putatively a beta, those bugs will be more prominent in the beta (and alpha) sections.  Maybe it’s time we acknowledge that Wikipedia is eight years old, and Linux is only 18, and start to compare the products of this new method of production with actual things that exist in the world, like Jaguar E-Types, and not hypothetical, mythical, magical encyclopedias, operating systems, databases and vector graphics packages that never crash, never have errors, are created and run by geniuses, and never have any problems at all, because they’re perfect.

And yes, I’m still throwing Wikipedia in the Open Source bucket, until Linus himself emails me a photo of his Jimbo Wales dartboard.

Isn’t the Web wonderful?  Students aren’t writing their own essays anymore (In fact, they’re looking for contract essay writers for the entire course of their college career).  Anthony DiPierro over at akahele makes the case that the optimism of participants in commons-based models (Open Source and Wikipedia) ignores the fact that “Almost all if not all of the great software projects, even in the open source world, were created by very small numbers of individuals.” Students would rather tweet or update Facebook than pay attention in class, with the result being a crisis of mixed input the likes of which would make Marcuse blanch.  The rise of mediocrity and the cult of the amateur seems to be the order of the day.

I, however, feel somehow unconvinced that all these easily accessible tools are causing the decline of civilization.  As I post my comments on an easily-accessible open-source blogging package, write my papers on a stable word processing/spreadheet/presentation package, check Wikipedia to see a list of Irish Famines, create little marines in Inkscape with some post-processing in GIMP, to be represented using PHP accessing an open-source database, I tend to agree that,  “Anyone who suggests that there is nothing to be learnt from making superior Free versions of proprietary systems, yet uses GNU/Linux, is simply thick.” But that doesn’t solve the niggling Wikipedia issue, where we all acknowledge that the vandalism, pernicious agendas and amateurish errors mean that Wikipedia really isn’t a perfect repository of knowledge.

But who’s being more foolish, the person who relies on an imperfect source of knowledge such as Wikipedia, or the person who clings to the belief that there were perfect sources of knowledge in some halcyon past?  Was there really a point when all newspapers were reliable sources of information or all historical texts accurately represented the root causes of progress and decline?  And more than that, even if we accept that for one day in 1977 all sources of knowledge were perfect in their unified, magisterial controls, does that make them better than the current imperfect sources of news, literature and knowledge that are actually accessible to, gasp, the unwashed masses both here and abroad?  Is it that everyone is growing mediocre or is it that we’re finally able to witness the actual level of understanding and engagement present among society (Both local and global) in a way that was kept under wraps during a less connected time?  Do you really think the Arabic Wikipedia caused the misunderstanding of socio-political processes in the Middle-East, or that it represents it?  Did the Chinese Wikipedia install the GMD in Taiwan or does it just reflect the current political divide?  On a more grounded level, have you noticed that the folks who claim that Wikipedia is junk because it’s not written by experts have a remarkable proclivity for ignoring experts (or deriding them) when they enter into the discussion in defense of the monolith?